New balance

It is in the middle of a dark and warm December, only days from the winter solstice. Days have been plenty gray and rainy recently. The perfect weather and perfect time of the year to be coughing, tired around the clock, somewhat down and most likely also stressed out about that Christmas just around the corner.

In a completely unexcpected turn of events, I seem to have steered away from just about all of that.

(Well, apart from the occasional dip when I hear about mankind's completely unnecessary backslides into xenophobia. What is wrong with us, and what can I do to help work against it?)

I have met great people of all kinds, I have cast pods. I have got out on a few more long-ish runs.

Oh yes, I got those last Christmas presents bought too. It felt as if I finished early this year, but I think that was mostly down to me not realizing just how close Christmas really is. Either way, it feels good to be done and good to not have stressed out too much about it. I am looking forward to the traditional journey home, possibly doing some IT support and definitely eating lots of food, exchanging a lot of wrapped things and meeting the whole family.

Projects

During our extravagant (cough) Christmas special podcast episode, Melin and I among other things discussed Christmas projects. I said that I do not really have one apart from hanging out with family and cuddling up in cosy corners with something nice to consume. That remains completely true, but thanks to a discussion on Kodsnack, I might actually find myself doing some coding in those cosy corners. We talked about practising programming, and one thing we talked about was doing the tasks in Advent of code. No sooner said than done, Tobias created a repo on Github, pushing up Swift solutions to the first two tasks. A listener soon followed with solutions in Elixir, and today I added some in Javascript. I do not know why I find it surprising, but it was surprisingly fun and easy to get caught up in solving well-written little problems.

Onboarding

Work has been fun and rewarding too. We hired another developer just a few weeks ago so I have found another nice challenge trying to pass on some knowledge in a reasonable way. I do not feel particularly good at it, but I at least enjoy the challenge and I think we as a team have done a lot better at onboarding this time than before. In my mind, at least, it also connects with the learning and spreading of knowledge going on around me when I attend meetups, participate in podcasts and simply just meet and talk to people. Getting someone to feel at home and up to speed at work is or could be or should be very much the same kind of social sharing of knowledge, and they should all be as relaxed and enjoyable.

Forward unto dawn

So, winter blues, I do not think you got hold of me this year. Not sorry at all about it.

There is also The force awakens. I would love to to an Incomparable-style podcast episode in Swedish about it. Who's with me?